Based on Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel, adapted by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films, this ABC-TV movie features Halle Berry as the free-spirited Janie, whose quest for love and a meaningful life challenges the morals of a small American town in the 1920s.

Darnell Martin was the first Black American woman to write and direct a film for a major Hollywood studio—I LIKE IT LIKE THAT (1994). Her other credits include CADILLAC RECORDS (2008), starring Beyoncé Knowles.

Emily Bernard is an author, and professor and scholar of African American literature. She is the author of the New York Times Notable Book, Remember Me to Harlem (2001).

Ben Gazzara plays an insolvent strip club owner at the mercy of the Mob in this highly original film noir. Philip Lopate said, “The American gangster picture is thrown for a loop in John Cassavetes’s stylized, fatalistic crime story.”

Romantic love is portrayed as a kind of carousel in this bittersweet and comic film about interlinked love affairs, based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play. The film was nominated for a “Best Screenplay” Oscar.

Adapted by director Sean Penn from Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book, INTO THE WILD tells the true, tragic story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who cashes in his savings and hitchhikes to Alaska to make a home in the wilderness. “Spellbinding.” (Roger Ebert)

MISSING PEOPLE is a nonfiction mystery about a woman who investigates her brother’s long unsolved murder. In the process she collects and researches the violent work and life of an artist from New Orleans. The film won the Best Documentary Award at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

David Shapiro, filmmaker, artist, and UAlbany graduate, directed the acclaimed 2000 documentary KEEP THE RIVER ON YOUR RIGHT: A MODERN CANNIBAL TALE, winner of many major film festival awards.

Seminar: David Shapiro will hold an afternoon seminar on documentary filmmaking and art on Friday, February 26 at 4:15 p.m. in the University Art Museum, Fine Arts Building, on the UAlbany Uptown Campus.

Cosponsored by the UAlbany Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Race, Love, and Labor, and the School of Criminal Justice’s Crime, Justice, and Social Structure Film Series

The last person to die on New Year’s Eve becomes the next year’s driver of the coach that carries the souls of the dead in this silent classic based on the novel by Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf. Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman cited the film as a major influence on his work.

A Korean immigrant girl confronts the challenges of making a new life in a cold, bleak, unnamed North American city. Director So Yong Kim received the Special Jury Prize at Sundance for the film, her first feature. The screening will be preceded by the 1917 Charlie Chaplin short, THE IMMIGRANT, restored in 2014 by film historian David Shepard.

Sponsored in association with Albany Pro Musica’s City of Immigrants Concert, a celebration of the rich cultural heritage of the Capital Region. See http://www.albanypromusica.org/concerts/ for additional information.

Ten years after robbing a bank, filmmaker Darius Clark Monroe takes a personal look at how his actions affected the lives of family, friends, and victims. Screened at over 100 international film festivals, the film received numerous awards including the IDA Emerging Filmmaker Award. The New Yorker said “its images, its shape, its tone, and its implications make it a terrific movie, as well as the birth of an artist.”

Darius Clark Monroe was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and “10 Filmmakers to Watch” by The Independent.

Sponsored in conjunction with UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice’s Crime, Justice, and Social Structure Film Series

This adaptation of playwright Edward Albee’s hilarious and harrowing masterpiece received thirteen Oscar nominations, and earned “Best Actress in a Leading Role” for Elizabeth Taylor.

Shown in association with the April 18 Burian Lecture with theatre director Pam MacKinnon, who received the 2013 Tony Award for Best Direction for her revival of the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(See Visiting Writers Series listing)

BROOKLYN, a hit independent film based on Colm Tóibín’s 2009 same-titled novel, tells the tale of a young Irish woman who emigrates to Brooklyn, where she must choose between two countries and her life in each. The Hollywood Reporter said, “Tóibín’s superior novel...has been turned into a beautiful and moving film.” The film stars Saoirse Ronan, whose performance in BROOKLYN earned her a 2016 Screen Actors Guild nomination for best female actor in a leading role.

Sponsored in association with Albany Pro Musica’s City of Immigrants Concert, a celebration of the rich cultural heritage of the Capital Region. See http://www.albanypromusica.org/concerts/ for additional information.